circa 1818-20of cruciform shape, painted in London with a bird perched on a broken branch, with puce, red, orange and purple plumage, wildflowers and grasses growing from rocks around it, the elaborate neoclassical border containing four panels of flower sprays, 22.6cm, impressed upper case Nant-garw C W mark, (a few minute patches of wear to the gilded rim only).

Footnotes

Three Nantgarw services with this kind of decoration are known and are discussed by W D John Nantgarw Porcelain, Supplement Number Two. This lot comes from a service originally in the possession of the Priest Richards family of 'Plâs Newydd', near Cowbridge, Glamorgan. In 1880, the service became a gift to Ella Priest Richards on the occasion of her marriage to The Mackintosh of Mackintosh, but by the turn of the century had been dispersed. This dish is one of a group of pieces bought back by The Mackintosh of Mackintosh from F Litchfield of the Sinclair Galleries in Shaftebury Avenue in 1901. All three services are thought to have been ordered by Mortlocks from the decorators Robbins and Randall of Barnsbury Street, Islington. W D John states that the subjects were copied from the books of Francois Levaillant, published between 1801 and 1806 and speculates that the painter was Charles Muss. More recently Roger Edmundsen has compared the painting with ornithological watercolours by Thomas Martin Randall, formerly in the Randall family collection. See Welsh Ceramics in Context (2003), p 204. Another soup plate from the service was sold at Bonhams London on 9 March 2005, lot 276

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